all things Terragen

Archive for the Category » How to.. «

Via Image Map Shader, you can load any texture fairly easily and use it as displacement to make a terrain out of it.

There is an easier way to do it, however! You can also load images with the Heightfield Load operator. When you add a terrain with Add Terrain > Heightfield (load file), the list allows .ter terrains, as well as .bmp and .tga bitmaps.

Be sure to know that the last selection in the list, “*.*”, shouldn’t be overlooked. If you choose this, you can load any file. Of course it makes little sense to load just any data, like an application. Images however, work perfectly. TG2 recognizes all the formats that it accepts for Image Maps. Some of those are .jpg/.jpeg and .png.

If Heightfield Load is used instead of Image Map, some shaders and a lot of tricky Projection and Displacement settings can be avoided!

As if it’s not frustrating enough that there aren’t a lot of free objects on the internet, a lot of them aren’t compatible with TG2 either. Often textures don’t load for example. However, this problem can be easily fixed! How it’s done is shown here with the use of the French Maple tree (Montpelier Maple, Acer monspessulanum) from the website of the TU Dresden. more…

If you’ve ever tried to stretch an imported terrain, i.e. a heightfield, over the whole planet like in TG0.9, you’ve probably run into some problems because heightfields don’t follow the curvature of the planet. more…

If you have ever tried to scatter Fake Stones by means of Slope, you may have realised that it comes with quite an amount of secondary effects attached that are sometimes hard to deal with. The aim of this tutorial is, therefore, to present a method with only two Shaders that – nonetheless – provides immaculate results. more…

A substantial problem with populations is their resource requirement. Having several populations in a scene often requires hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of memory.

Before Vista was released in 2007, the typical PC had been equipped with relatively little memory. But you don’t get very far with 512MB. Furthermore, the population process can take quite some time.
So, what do populations have to be like if you want them to be generated fast and economically? more…

A while ago, someone asked me how to rotate heightfields. Not even every terrain editor offers an option to rotate a heightfield 90°, which could be easily implemented. TG2 doesn’t provide this functionality either, let alone rotation by an arbitrary angle. Only 180° rotation is possible – by setting both Flip options.

Using the following method, you will be able to rotate heightfields by an angle in the range (-90°, 90°). That is excluding -90° and 90°. Rotations by 90° and multiples should be performed in an external editor. more…

Inserting objects into a scene isn’t as difficult as it may seem, as long as you have compatible objects. This tutorial refers to the free Xfrog plants offered at Planetside: Download
It works, however, with all other compatible objects as well.

Here we will insert the medium age sweet birch (BL02m_Sweet_Birch.tgo), very typically, on top of a hill.

Among the functions of TG2 we can find the function called “Voronoi”. If you’re well schooled in World Machine, you know that it can sometimes be a helpful one. The following is one possibility to use the Voronoi function to create dry, cracked ground. more…